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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Fuck Cars
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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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A good observation from previous threads: "Whenever utility cycling is discussed on the internet, suddenly everyone has to move their fridge 100 miles in the rain"
Suddenly, all the north Canadians who live with snow storms 24/7 appear to comment how all the world infrastructure has to adapt to their specific needs.
What's ironic is my city, Montreal, is arguably the biggest cycling city in North America. Even in winter the bike lanes are filled with cyclists. Why? Turns out that all you need is good-quality bike infrastructure that you actually maintain in the winter and people will happily bike year-round.
Montréal : cycle year round.
Laval/Brossard/Kirkland/PET/Montréal Est/... : obviously it's impossible to cycle at any time ever and we must always drive.
Apparently all Canadians live in remote cabins several hours away from the nearest town, based on the "how can I live without a car" replies I've gotten over the years.
50 percent of canadians live below the 49th parallel. 90 percent live within 160 kms ~~(iirc) 20kms~~ of the border between canada and the usa
Canada has roughly 40 million people.
*Longest undefended border in the world
*Canada has more fresh water than any other country and almost 9% of Canadian territory is water; Canada has at least 2 million and possibly over 3 million lakes - that is more than all other countries combined
Just some contextual information for anyone who isnt familiar with canada reading your comment. Not directed at the comment i replied to, just thought it might be useful
That 90% is within 100 miles of the border, not 20km. And keep in mind that border is one of the longest on the planet. Not that it's a good reason to have cars (it takes days to drive between Toronto and Vancouver, I think a train would be a much better experience for something more efficient than a flight).
Thanks! wasnt sure about how close to the border will fix.
And because you mentioned the length of the border, ill also add another tidbit in the edit
This is way off topic, but I'm curious about the fresh water thing. Does that include frozen water, and how does Antarctica fit into that metric? I know Antarctica is a continent, but is it also a country? Is it multiple?
Edit: I return with knowledge!
Antarctica has no countries, but does have regions where certain other countries have "claimed". Also the info is pretty dated (late 80's I think), but there's a large portion that is totally unclaimed land entirely. Fun fact: this is the only large land area on the planet that's unclaimed by a country.
As for fresh water content: Antarctica holds about 70% of Earth's fresh water as ice. As a scale reference: If that all melted, it would be enough to raise the planet's sea levels by nearly 200 feet (~60 feet higher than the 2011 tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan).
It's amazing how people think skiing is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, yet think biking in the cold is somehow impossible.
Skis are optimized to move efficiently on top of snow, while bicycle wheels are not.
This is one of the big reasons why good plowing is a key feature required for winter cycling in snowy climates. My city has been doing alright in this regard, and I've been able to continue cycling for some of my trips. Transit is so good here though that I use that over cycling while the weather is really bad.
All Canadiens live in the permafrost
The only thing you need to say back is "Oslo"
As someone who doesn’t have a license or a car, but does bike a lot - there will be solutions.
I order my groceries delivered. When I needed to get my old bed recycled, I asked the second hand store and they came and picked it up. They weren’t interested in the broken mattress for it (obviously), so I contacted a moving company and they had it recycled for $40.
Now I get that that cost might be hard to swallow for some, but keep in mind that I don’t pay for my car, its insurance, the fuel, or maintenance, and it took less than five minutes for me to be done with the entire thing. All I had to do was open my front door and two burly men came and picked it up for me. I didn’t even have to wait at the recycling station.
Those $40 paid for themselves.
It’s also worth noting that I do live in the frozen north (not Canada, further north), where we don’t see the sun for half the year. I see people biking year round.
Where I live it costs $40 to drop a mattress off for recycling, and almost anyone who will sell you a mattress will take the old one away for about $40
I actually asked IKEA if they would recycle the old bed, but sadly they stopped that during corona and there hasn’t been much demand for the service since so they just don’t offer that anymore.
Segue: I’d bought my previous bed from MIO. It was a continental, bought right at the start of corona because at the time companies had massive discounts since they were scared that people would stop spending during the pandemic. At the time it replaced my 15 year old bed that was really worn, and at 50% off (7k instead of 14, currency is SEK) I was like “wow, what a steal!”
Then the middle mattress broke after less than three years. Couldn’t figure out why I had such a big divot in the middle of the bed, but as it turns out the side had broken and as such the springs had all gotten misaligned.
Called them in September, three years and six months or so after purchase. Turns out that the bed had a 10 year warranty but the mattress only had 3.
So I had to buy a new bed, much cheaper (like 6K with the mattress), from IKEA, and their mattress has a TEN year warranty. It’s also much firmer and more supportive so I regret not just going with them in the first case.
Never buying shit from MIO again.
The psychology behind prices surrounding cars is outright evil. You don't even notice how much you spend on them because everything is auto-deducted from your accounts (insurance, registration, etc.), gas is death by a thousand cuts, and repairs are seen as a necessity because it's your transportation.
I'm well aware I'm saving money by not having a car. However, spending $40 on bike maintenance every few months feels so much more expensive than $400 on a car, even though the bike is my transportation.
Yeah, it depends on the context. Is the thread saying "we need to build out far more cycling infrastructure"? If so, no argument.
Or is the thread one of the naiive ones trying to argue about how we can completely eliminate cars? Then people start bringing up the edge cases that still require cars.
You say that as if those threads are actually a common thing, and not just a strawman accusation from the fevered dreams of car-brains.
Go into a thread on autonomous cars and all you'll hear is about how they're useless and we don't need them because we'll just eliminate all cars before they're ready.
I have literally never seen that argument made.
Usually, what I see in those threads are a whole bunch of people arguing that autonomous cars would be some kind of silver-bullet panacea for traffic.
Frankly, what you wrote sounds like a strawman misinterpretation of an argument I myself make: I argue that autonomous cars are not a solution, but not "because we’ll just eliminate all cars before they’re ready." They're not a solution simply because they're still cars, and therefore take up the same grossly excessive amount of space as non-autonomous cars do.
Yeah, the only things autonomous cars might reduce are:
It's the same fundamental problem that electric cars have: geometry. Cars -- even if electric and self-driving -- are simply grossly inefficient at moving people for the amount of land they require:
The velomobile (electric or manual) is the most efficient transport in energy per mile. You could easily design something like a self driving podbike, maybe a little bigger, weighing maybe 100kg.
And self driving also allows for new configurations, e.g. two seats that face each other because you don't need a steering wheel. That means much more narrow and aerodynamic "micro cars" that could solve a lot of edge cases for people who can't drive or not that long or fast (50kmh / 30mph). They might compete with a big bus.
You'd typically hear this in the context of Dutch-style city planning, where direct routes through cities are only available to cycles and buses, and only indirect routes are available to cars.
So cars and other vehicles such as ambulances, furniture-removal vans etc. can still drive to every house from the ring-road, but it is no longer convenient to get from one place to another within the same city by car (which is obviously the design, as it promotes cycling and bus use)
People who drive within the city and would be inconvenienced then suddenly discover a newfound interest in the rights of, for example, disabled people, as they search for counter-arguments.
They don't let ambulances use the bus routes?
I'm sure the transponders needed to access/cross the city centre would be given to any city or emergency vehicles that needed them, same as the buses - the point was more that every residential address is still accessible by road for those special cases such as deliveries, garbage collection, trade vans, emergencies, etc., even when you block roads to prioritise transit and cycling
Emergency vehicles generally have unrestricted access as far as I know, which also makes car-restricted infrastructure far superior to regular car infrastructure, on account of not being congested by cars.
Can't agree more.
Fact is that we can't get rid of cars completely in our current society without billions in infrastructure changes, displacement and forced developments and regulations. Which unfortunately also means most roads are here to stay.
Can the number of trips and lanes come down- absolutely. New developments take mass transit and alternative travel into consideration- I hope so. Eliminate- no.
...and they'd have a much better time of it if there were less car traffic.